Why Local SEO Is So Important for Your Business

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Rapid advances in Google’s ranking algorithm and radical changes in the way consumers behave have made it increasingly difficult to talk about search engine optimisation (SEO) without specifically touching on local search.

But what is it about local SEO that has marketers and business operators so excited? Here are six key reasons that local SEO has become so important for businesses in Australia:

Local SEO Helps You Target More Relevant Traffic.
When a small company first gets started with in-house search engine optimisation, they’re bound to make more than a few rookie mistakes. One of these could be focusing on generating more traffic to the website without giving much thought to who these new site visitors are or what they’re after. There are many ways to address this potential problem when researching and selecting keywords to target. For locally focused (and especially bricks-and-mortar) businesses, optimising for local search is one of the most effective ways to ensure that the increased traffic correlates to their target customers.

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8 Amazing Ways For SEO To Help Small Businesses

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In a world full of large scale companies competing in a cut-throat environment, a lot of small ventures get beaten by a considerable margin. From logistical capabilities, enormous financial differentials, to overall company power, a small business just cannot compete with such huge corporations.

For small time entrepreneurs, the fact stated above may discourage them from starting home-grown ventures. They think that they’ll just end up with the other businesses that get eaten up by the “Big Boys.”

However, to the few who want to wade into deep waters and test the market, an emerging strategy is beginning to take the world by storm: Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short.

Here are some advantages that SEO can bring to small time business owners.

Cost Efficiency

One of the advantages that SEO can bring is that utilizing it doesn’t have to cost too much. As with other types of businesses, finances usually have to be spent. These funds are called investments. There are a lot of services out there that can offer help when it comes to SEO ranking.

Some companies who manage SEO, they have a “no rank, no pay” policy. This system means that if a blog or site does not appear to rank, then the entrepreneur doesn’t have to pay anything to that company.

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How to Defend Your Business Website from Negative SEO

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Even if you’ve been playing by Google’s rules, keeping up with frequent algorithm changes, you might still find yourself to be a victim of negative SEO.

How come?

You have to look over the fence into your competitor’s backyard, as they might be the ones playing it dirty, setting up traps in order to make sure you fail. By dropping out of search engine’s good graces, your company is bound to hit the bottom, what has a negative effect on your rankings, visibility, visits, and, ultimately, conversions and revenue.

What many tend to forget is that once you hit the rock bottom, the only way you can go is – up. But how?

1. Use Google Search Console alerts

Google Search Console represents extremely valuable collection of tools which include information about search traffic, search appearance, technical status update, crawl data and other educational resources. With this in mind, it is evident why it found its place in almost every website owner’s, webmaster’s and SEO professional’s toolbox.

If you’re using Google Search Console as well, then you know you can leverage it to monitor the safety of your website. It helps you detect any kind of abuse, and to react quickly to any weird activity, turn on alerts. In order to do that, go to the GSC dashboard, choose settings and then go to Preferences. There you simply enable email notifications and you’ll get alerts directly to your inbox.

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5 SEO Tasks Your Secretary or Assistant Can Do in Their Spare Time

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When you’re out of the office or during downtime, your secretary could be completing SEO tactics that won’t take up too much time. He or she could be maximizing your website in the search engines in between answering your phones or scheduling your appointments.

1. Research and Target Relevant Keywords

Before adding more content or following any of the other suggestions, it’s vital that your secretary is able to find relevant keywords for your industry. The keywords should be more specific than a general one like HVAC, home builder or lawyer. When you choose keywords, they have to be more specific to ensure that you’re moving up in the search engine rankings. It’s not enough to publish a website. If you want to find organic traffic through SEO, you have to find the right keywords. If you’re a personal injury attorney, use keywords like car accident lawyer or slip and fall attorney to gain relevant traffic. You can use Google’s own keyword planner to find the right SEO keywords.

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Five Ways to Stabilise Your Small Business Income

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It’s 2016 and the world around you is changing. More and more people are owning small businesses. The internet has progressed and evolved since its early days, and people are flooding to get their small businesses out there through websites and other platforms. For those of us who are current small business owners, it was not easy to get here. So many hurdles to jump, so many failures to overcome. But here we are and we plan to stay here so long our income continues to go up and not the other way. Stabilizing your small business income should be at the top of your list of important things to keep in mind. With the economy note yet on its feet, it’s best to focus your attention on this subject. In this article we will give you 5 ways to stabilize your small business income.

1. Track All Of Your Expenses

This one might seem like a simple one but creating a budget for literally everything is essential when running a small business. Make sure you are keeping an eye out on ALL of your accounts as your small business keeps growing. It’s as simple as gathering all receipts used throughout the day and making sure to either write down or put in the computer any and all payments coming in and out. Do not leave anything out; meals you eat on the go, gas used to get from one place to another, supplies bought at another location – it all adds up in the end. By not keeping up with all of the expenses, you end up not being able to create a reliable financial statement or conjure up correct reports on your tax returns.

2. Boost your SEO

SEO is important when wanting to up your revenue or attract more customers. SEO is not difficult and should often be updated to keep up a certain amount of traffic on your small business website. You’re going to wanna utilize keywords that are a bit closer to your niche and that have fewer competitors. The URLs you use be able to take your customers back to your main site and should also have indicators of the content on the same page, such as the page title. Also, you’re going to want to avoid using numbers or odd strings of text in your URLs – this is so that you do not lead people away from your page. And finally, every article you publish on your page should also be be accompanied by social share icons that lead to your small business’s Facebook page or Twitter account. In a sense, it’s like killing two birds with one stone.

3. Learn To Separate Personal and Business Money

This applies to new and seasoned small business owners alike. It’s important always to keep business, and personal money separate. Try going with easy-to-use software, such as QuickBooks. Honestly, you don’t need to be an accounting expert to keep track of your income and expenses. However, if you know you won’t enter information into the computer software every once in awhile while it’s still fresh in your mind, you might want to get a simple cash book from the local supply store. Make sure to write all the money that comes in and all that goes out. You can end up with way too many financial headaches if you do not organize and optimize your financial records.

4. Stop The Habit Of Using Your Sales Tax Money

This one should come as no surprise to all small business owners. It will certainly cost you way more in future penalties, fees, interest, time and aggravation than obtaining some short term financing. The most reliable strategy is to discipline yourself to deposit all the sales tax money you gain each and every day into a separate bank account. Now, why do this you may ask; it’s simple; tax liabilities grow due to business owners using the tax money they collect and will gain working capital for their current operations

5. Don’t Forget To Pay Yourself The Right Amount And No More

It’s Friday afternoon, and it’s time for the weekend to begin. So like always, you pay yourself what you want and sometimes even take a little more out that you need for whatever weekend plans you might have. In the short run, this seems like an okay thing to do – but in the long term, this is just bankruptcy waiting to happen. Even when the business is thriving, it is important to continue to draw only YOUR salary. This is because the “down times” will be coming eventually through the natural business cycle of your small business. It’s not fun to leave the money in the firm during times of plenty, but it sure is nice to have those reserves when the company is struggling in future. So make sure only to grab what you need and leave the rest. It’ll surely help shortly.

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Joel House runs a leading Queensland based SEO Agency  – Black Shirt Marketing. When he is not growing businesses across Queensland, he has his head in books to ensure he is on the cutting edge of all things small business and digital marketing

Tips for Maximizing SEO on a Small Business Budget

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Small businesses are becoming more visible these days as consumers actively search for them online. There are more opportunities than ever for small businesses to impact the local community and make a positive change in the economy. However, in order to take advantage of these opportunities, small businesses will need to step up their marketing game. Competition, especially in the digital marketing space, is now fiercer than ever.

While most businesses know they can benefit from an SEO company’s services, their marketing budgets may not be big enough to enable them to purchase an all-inclusive package with all the bells and whistles. Instead of giving up, these companies should do some groundwork to ensure they get the most out of their existing SEO campaigns.

Research your competitors

Small business owners often don’t have a very clear idea of who their direct competitors are. They also tend to be unfamiliar with the wants and needs of their target audience, and clueless as to what’s “trending” in their industries. In addition, business owners often develop tunnel vision and a single-minded focus on sales. This can be fatal in the online space.

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10 steps to improve lead conversion

10 Steps to Improving Lead Conversion with Great Landing Pages

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Many SME’s use pay-per-click advertising as a cost effective way of generating leads. Unfortunately, it’s not enough to just have someone click on an ad, businesses need to be able to convert their visitors – by having contacts details exchanged for downloading a paper, signing up to a newsletter, sending an enquiry to start a conversation.
So what are the best ways to optimise landing pages for lead generation campaigns?

Here are 10 to get started:

1. Each landing page should have a dedicated purpose and message. Customise landing pages for each campaign being run so they are relevant to the advertisement they have clicked on and never, never, never send them to a home page.

2. In line with above, immediately address the reason they have arrived at the page – align the message on the landing page with the message in the advertisement they clicked on to get there. In addition, communicate how their needs/interests/issues are being met and highlight the value of the offering.

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Search Engine Optimisation

Basic Principles of Search Engine Optimisation

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Google Search Engine’s Goal is simple – to give visitors the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible. With this in mind, Google asks over 200 questions of each page before delivering the results.

Questions such as:

Do the searched words appear in the title of the website, the URL (website address),  headings, copy of the website, image alt tags?

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Promoting Your Website Using Article Marketing

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Having worked with a large number of small business owners, one common mistake I see over and over again is the obscene amounts of money they throw away on advertising. Many of them believe the more money they spend, the more business it will bring. WRONG!!!
WRONG!!! WRONG!!!

So what’s a new entrepreneur to do?

It’s simple!!! Write articles.

Writing articles is an excellent way for you to get free publicity. Getting an article published is free and some publications even pay for your contributions. The publicity you receive by having your article published in a newspaper, magazine or website can be worth thousands of dollars in equivalent advertising space. Well written articles yield better results than advertisements and earn you respect from customers, who see you as an expert in your field.

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